Edmund Blunden

Author Code: EEDB

Born: Nov. 1, 1896 - London, England

Died: Jan. 20, 1974 - Long Melford, Suffolk, England

Educated at Christ's Hospital and Queen's College, Oxford where he read classics, Blunden left school in order to volunteer for the army in 1915. In early 1916 he joined the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment and saw action throughout the Western Front, winning the Military Cross for bravery under fire. When he was finally de-mobbed in 1919, he was the longest serving of the 'War Poets'. He began writing poetry at school and continued during the war and when he returned to Oxford in 1919, he began to study English literature. It was at this time that he struck up a lasting friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, who was the literary editor of the Daily Herald and who encouraged Blunden in his writing. Because of financial difficulties, Blunden again left Oxford to become a writer for the Athenaeum. In 1920, he published The Waggoner and Other Poems which won rave reviews and firmly established his literary reputation. Later that year, he published Poems Chiefly From Manuscript, being a collection of hitherto unpublished poems by John Clare. Suffering stress from the effects of the war, he traveled to South America for his health. Returning to England in 1922, he won the Hawthornden Prize for The Shepherd, a collection of poems on war and peace. He took a professorial position at Tokyo University in 1924 and spent three years there. He returned to England in 1927 and finished his autobiographical prose work Undertones of War, which was published in 1928. In 1930, he became the literary editor of The Nation and later that year began teaching at Merton College, Oxford. Blunden was instrumental in getting the poems of Wilfrid Owen published in 1931. In 1940, he returned to the army as a teacher at Oxford's Officer Training Corps. After the war he worked for a time as an assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement before taking a position as cultural advisor to the UK liaison mission to Japan. Ever popular in Japan, he was elected to the Japan Academy in 1950 and he remains to this day one of the most popular Western poets in Japan. In 1953, he took the chair of English at Hong Kong University until his retirement in 1964. After the death of his friend Sassoon in 1967, Blunden's own health began to deteriorate and he ceased to publish. He is one of the sixteen 'War Poets' commemorated at Westminster Abbey. His other works include The Bonadventure (1922), Marks of Time (1925), Retreat (1928), Near and far (1929), Leigh Hunt (1930), The Face of England (1932), English Villages (1941), Cricket Country (1944), After the Bombing (1949), Charles Lamb (1954) and A Hong Kong House (1962).

eBook Code

Title/Sub-Title

Pub. Yr

Pages

File Size

Type

Download Format

Find Printed Copy

EEDB003

The Bonadventure

1922

82

443k

EEDB002

Nature in English Literature

1929

52

316k

EEDB004

Shells By a Stream

Aircraft

Alumnus in Luck

Among All These

At A Cathedral Service

The Boy on Leave

A Church

Claire's Birthday in 1940

A Country Character

Dovedale on A Spring Day

The Fine Nature

The Florilegium

The Flowers

For the Country Life

Fulfilment

Gibbon: in the Margin

The Gift: for C.M.P.

God's Time

The Happiest

The Home of Poetry

Lascelles Abercrombie

The Lost Name

Lovelight

The Man in the Street

To the Memory of Coleridge

Morning in March 1943

The Nameless Stream

Nature and the Lost

October Comes

Octogenarian

On A Journey, 1943

One Among the Roses

One Kind of Artist

The Ornamental Water

A Painted Window

A Patrol

A Prospect of Swans

A Remembrance

Shells By A Stream

The Spring Gale

To Teise, A Stream in Kent

Thomasine

Thoughts of Thomas Hardy

Tigranes

Timber

Time Together

Travellers, 193-

Triumph of Autumn

The Two Books

The Unfortunate Shipmate

The Vanishing Land

The Victor

The Waterfall

What is Winter?

The Winter Walk

1945

62

224k

EEDB001

The Waggoner and Other Poems

Almswomen

The Barn

Changing Moon

Chinese Pond

Clare's Ghost

A Country God

The Estrangement

The Gods of the Earth Beneath

In Festubert

Leisure

Malefactors

Mont De Cassel

Perch-Fishing

The Pike

Sheepbells

Sick-bed

The Sighing Time

The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill

Storm at Hoptime

On Turning a Stone

The Unchangeable

The Veteran

The Waggoner

A Waterpiece

Wilderness

1920

38

243k

Note: An Asterisk (*) after an author´s name signifies that this is a Pseudonym